It seems there is a consensus in the EA community that building new nuclear power plants is a net positive for the world. For example, this video by Kurzgesagt summarizes some arguments in support of nuclear power as a tool to mitigate the global warming.
I wonder if the consensus is premature.
So far, I’ve encountered the following counterarguments worth pondering about:
Solar and wind power plants can be fully controlled and owned by individuals and small communities, with zero intervention from the gov. On the other hand, there is a strong societal consensus that nuclear plants must be strictly regulated or even owned by gov. Thus, a nuclear-powered country is a statist country, which is bad.
See also: Hydraulic empire
Judging by the number of nuclear-power-related fatalities, nuclear plants are rather safe. So far. But in the systems that can go horribly wrong unless properly maintained, the past performance is not a good indicator of the future performance. E.g. if Russians ruin the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the catastrophe will dwarf all the past nuclear disasters, combined. Thus, nuclear power plants are safe-on-average but horrible-in-the-worst-case. One human mistake can make a London-sized area uninhabitable for decades. And humans tend to make mistakes. In comparison, solar and wind are safe on average and in the worst case.
Nuclear plants are safe in the times of peace. But it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll have more war and terrorism in the future, due to technogenic unemployment and the effects of global warming.
In the West, nuclear power is not the fastest way to get a lot of new renewable energy. A nuclear power plant is a large and complex piece of engineering, with the strictest regulations and the strongest NIMBY tendencies. If you disregard the opposition of the local residents, you can build nuclear plants relatively fast (e.g. China). But in democratic societies, it may be a better idea to build new solar / wind / energy storage factories instead.
The solar/wind option is also more acceleratable.
Solar / wind tech is already mass produced, and can be easily scaled up. Nuclear power plants are too complex and too regulated to be mass produced in the near future.
Individuals and small communities can apply direct action to speed up solar and wind, and do it efficiently. In the simplest case, you can install a solar roof, and then brag about its (quite real) financial benefits until your friends do the same. On the other hand, there is no realistic way for you to speed up the nuclear option. “This pundit’s witty tweet convinced the president to change the country’s nuclear policy, to rewrite all the regulations, and to build 50 new nuclear plants in 5 years”—is a rather unlikely scenario. Instead of chirping into the void, one can invest the same time into installing additional solar panels in the backyard, with a greater impact. Direct action is almost always more efficient than trying to change governmental policies or public opinion.
Some other reasonable counterarguments?
Carbon reduction is a global challenge, hence reengineered power generation is too. Normalizing nuclear means deploying plants in potentially under-developed or faltering societies around the world. While “London-sized” mistakes are increasingly less likely with newer technologies, the potential dirty-bomb weaponization of the fuel remains troubling.
The unforeseen consequences of nuke plants in places like Syria, Somalia, Lebanon, et al seem pretty bad.
(disclosure: I am a proponent of nuclear power overall)
Argument that hasn’t been mentioned: Even though nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are different technologies they are still sufficiently close that betting on nuclear energy will probably diffuse more know-how on how to build nuclear weapons.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s assessment (quickly) summarized (and possibly somewhat distorted by that):
Uranium 235 is currently used at about 60K tons per year. World reserves are estimated to be 8M tons. Increasing the number of NPPs of current designs by a factor of ~10 means it’s about 15-20 years until it’d no longer be economically viable to mine U235. Combined with the time scales & costs of building & mothballing NPPs, that’s pretty useless. So while some new constructions might make sense, it’s not good as a central pillar of a strategy.
Due to the cost of NPP construction etc., nuclear power is way more expensive than all other options. Price of renewables is likely to continue to fall, widening the gap even further. So nuclear is economically very unappealing, and that’s most likely just getting worse with time.
Research into new tech takes time (e.g. designs that could use the other 99.3% of available Uranium that’s not U235), and the currently available or soon-to-be available candidates aren’t looking much better, they’re unreliable and/or likely cost even more (at least initially).
That does not count uranium in seawater. While we currently can’t mine it at the same cost from seawater as we can mine it elsewhere, we can mine from seawater.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Fishing-uranium-ocean-spider-silk/97/web/2019/07 suggests that currently, the price for uranium from seawater is six times as expensive as other sources. The price of uranium is not very important for the price of nuclear energy and paying six times as much for it wouldn’t be a problem.
As a supporter of the claim, ‘in the long run, more nuclear power generation is a good thing’, my best argument for why to not build nuclear power plants now is that I think we’d be better of first investing (a lot!) in more research on safety, reliability, efficiency. Commit to building beginning in 10 years after spending about 2 trillion dollars a year for those 10 years on research.
Nuclear power plants need to be a pretty specific distance from water, which hurts their use as a solution to a problem that causes rising water levels
Economics of nuclear reactors aren’t particularly great due to regulatory costs and (at least in most western countries) low build rates/talent shortage. This can be improved by massively scaling nuclear energy up (including training more talent), but there isn’t any political will to do that
Nuclear power has the highest chance of The People suddenly demanding it be turned off twenty years later for no good reason. Baseload shouldn’t be hostage to popular whim.
I read somewhere about the higher risks related to cooling the power plant because of the increasing commonness of droughts. Not sure of the magnitude of the problem but considering the worsening climate for the next 30 years it does seem to be in good faith.
They may not be completely passively safe?